🎱Competitions

The undisputed summit of the sport, staged at the 980-seat Crucible Theatre in Sheffield every spring since 1977. Thirty-two players reach the main draw after a brutal qualifying competition, and the format escalates from best of nineteen to a best-of-35 final played over four sessions and two days. The winner receives 500,000 pounds from a prize fund of roughly 2.4 million. Joe Davis won the first fifteen editions; Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Hendry share the modern record of seven. Zhao Xintong's 2025 win made him the first Asian champion.

Historically the second most important tournament in snooker and the longest-format event outside Sheffield, held at the Barbican in York since 2001. It began as a UK-only competition and opened to overseas players in 1980, becoming a ranking event in 1984. Ronnie O'Sullivan holds the record with eight titles, spread from 1993 to 2023, a span that itself illustrates his longevity. Ding Junhui's three UK titles, the first won at 18 in 2005, remain the strongest evidence of Chinese arrival at the top level.

The sport's most prestigious invitational event, contested by the world's top sixteen players and staged at Alexandra Palace in north London since 2012. It carries no ranking points but ranks alongside the World and UK Championships in prestige, largely because of its field, its atmosphere and the fact that every match is played in front of a large, loud crowd rather than a hushed theatre. Ronnie O'Sullivan has won it a record eight times. Ding Junhui's 2011 victory was the first by an Asian player.

A tournament open only to players who have won a title in the preceding year, producing one of the strongest fields in snooker without any qualifying rounds. Originally staged briefly in the late 1970s, it was revived in 2013 and has become a fixture of the autumn calendar with a group-and-knockout structure and one of the larger prize funds outside the Triple Crown. Ronnie O'Sullivan and Judd Trump have both won it multiple times, and its format guarantees that early rounds pit major winners against each other.

The most important tournament staged in China and the anchor of snooker's Asian calendar. Launched as a ranking event in 2007 during the boom that followed Ding Junhui's emergence, it was relaunched in 2019 as a high-value invitational for a restricted field, with a prize fund that rivals ranking tournaments twice its size. It plays to full arenas and large domestic television audiences, and its status reflects a wider truth about the modern tour: a substantial share of snooker's commercial value now comes from a market that had almost no players thirty years ago.

Snooker's newest heavyweight, launched in Riyadh in 2024 with the largest prize fund of any tournament apart from the World Championship. It introduced a novelty found nowhere else in professional snooker: a gold ball worth 20 points, playable only after a maximum has already been compiled, which raises the theoretical maximum break to 167. The event's arrival divided opinion, welcomed by players for the money it injects into a tour where earnings drop sharply outside the top sixteen, and questioned by others over the sport's growing dependence on Gulf funding.

The premier event of the women's game, run by World Women's Snooker under the WPBSA umbrella. England's Reanne Evans dominated it for a generation, winning twelve consecutive titles from 2005, before Hong Kong's Ng On-yee broke the run and took three championships of her own; more recently Chinese and Thai players have reached the final, reflecting the same geographic shift seen on the main tour. The champion now earns a two-year professional tour card, creating a direct pathway between the women's championship and the 128-player World Snooker Tour.